Buick Team's Purpose Deep-seated

The members of this Buick team don't have to run, catch, throw or even employ an agent to argue salary.

This team demands only three things from those who want to join and wear the coveted Buick Comfort Team shirt.

Butt. Back. Sacroiliac.

The BCT wants people with aches and pains-men and women, short and tall, svelte and not so svelte. Youth need not apply. It's the middle-age folks they're looking for.

The team was formed about 1 1/2 years ago to critique car seats. To do so it travels 1,000 to 1,500 miles to measure seat-of-the-pants reactions to automotive furniture.

"Once a month we take to the road for three days to travel in cars equipped with prototype seats for the future," explained David Whitten, who when not acting as BCT coach is advanced concepts project manager for Buick in Flint, Mich.

Whitten, on a visit to Chicago last week as the team passed through on a journey to Milwaukee before heading back to Flint, said that by analyzing seats two to three years in advance of production, Buick has the chance to make changes in seat softness, firmness, height, width, length or other factors.

"It used to be that the first time you got into the seat it was in a prototype car. All the tooling had been done and the seat had already been approved for production," Whitten said. "Then we asked ourselves, `What's wrong with this picture?' Now our 1995 Riviera seat will have gone through nine generations of change before being approved."

On this trip 14 cars were caravaning the Midwest to check out the '95 Riviera, '96 Skylark, '96 Century and '95 Roadmaster seats-front and rear-along with a handful of competitors' cars, such as the Lincoln Mark VIII, to determine where Buick excels or falls short.

Comfort team members come from Buick and other GM divisions, from parts suppliers who serve GM and from workers hired from a Michigan temporary-help service. The purpose is to get a variety of shapes and sizes into those seats to measure any source of pain, grief or aggravation.

For decades automakers regularly checked out cars and their engines and transmissions years in advance of production to determine whether they would work as designed. Millions of miles were driven on proving-ground roadways to hone the machines and their components.

Seats, however, weren't given a second thought. The idea was to put seats front and rear and make them look nice, but no one really cared how well or poorly they functioned. Seats were necessary, but exterior styling and under-the-hood power sold cars.

The Buick Comfort Team represents a major breakthrough from Detroit in that someone finally realized that no matter how good-looking or powerful a car may be, if the driver or passenger exits messaging the tailbone, something is seriously wrong.

"Comfort is the absence of discomfort," Whitten says. "We use different-size people age 45 to 55, the range of our typical buyers. We want people who feel aches and pains and maybe have a bit of arthritis, people who feel discomfort when driving. We don't want 25-year-olds. They're too flexible and resilient. They wouldn't feel a problem if they were riding on a brick."

We joined the team on a course along Lake Shore Drive. While baseball, basketball and football teams assign players to the bench to rest, the BCT assigns members to the buckets to work. Bucket seats, that is. Our assignment on this day was to compare the passenger's seat in the 1993 Lincoln Mark VIII with a prototype seat destined for the 1995 Buick Riviera, which comes out next spring.

After 10 minutes of travel, drivers and passengers were questioned over the group's CB network to learn strengths and weaknesses.

Ten minutes is the time most people spend test-driving a car before buying. Checking out the engine/transmission/braking/sound system takes most of the 10 minutes. It's not until after the purchase that the owner takes the extended vacation trip, only to realize the seats are like granite.

The team takes note of each seat's good features but focuses most of its attention on potential irritants. The seats are far enough away from production to make any change deemed needed, so it's better to determine what fixes can be made than to give pats on the back for what was done right.

A check again after 30 minutes brings a chorus of degrees of discomfort from "too wide" from one car to "sinking in the butt pocket" from another to "sitting on a board," "way too firm" and "butt burn."

It was the rookie team member who was plagued by butt burn, a problem that developed because the seat bottom on the Mark VIII not only seemed to have very little give, it was so short there was almost no thigh support.

After one hour, sufficient time for a poor design to start numbing legs or pinching backs, the team stops and fills out a lengthy seat-of-the-pants questionnaire that judges height, width and length; softness and stiffness; thigh, leg, shoulder and back support; and even "butt pockets."